Week one in the trench.

Six weeks off writing. That was longer than I meant it to be. Something worth writing about now, though.

A founder in central Florida turned his ops over to me for a Trenching engagement this September. He runs a mid-market services business, about forty people on payroll, three locations. He has been through two management consultants and one "fractional COO" in the last four years. He signed the Trenching engagement in August. I started on-site the first Monday of the month.

I want to walk through what week one actually looked like. Not the pitch version. The week.

Monday, 7:40 AM

I am sitting in a folding chair in a warehouse office that smells like coffee and diesel. The owner is on the phone with his insurance broker. His ops manager is in the shop bay walking a technician through a repair the tech has already done twice this month. Nobody has spoken to me yet. That is exactly right.

The first week of a Trenching engagement is boring on purpose. No dashboards. No decks. No new tools. No SOPs get rewritten. I do not touch a system on the first Monday. I do not touch one on the first Friday either. What I do is sit inside the business and watch it run.

Monday, all day

I shadow the owner. He does not have a schedule I can predict, which is the point. I want to see what actually eats his day, not what he tells me eats his day when we are on the Sweep call. He fields a customer call about a $180 invoice discrepancy. He signs off on a purchase order for parts he has not priced. He walks the floor twice. He eats a granola bar at his desk while emailing his accountant. By 3 PM he has not touched the CRM once. Nobody at his company has touched the CRM today.

I write this down. I do not say anything about it yet.

Tuesday, ops meeting

There is a standing 8:00 AM meeting on Tuesdays. I ask if I can sit in. The ops manager runs it. She has a printed sheet with about eighteen line items on it. They cover roughly four of them, cancel out of the meeting when a customer callback comes in for the owner, and never return to the remaining fourteen.

I ask her afterward, casually, where the sheet came from. She prints it fresh every Tuesday from a Google Doc she updates manually from three tools. Two of the tools do not share data. The third has an export button that dumps the wrong date range unless she remembers to reset a filter. It takes her about an hour every Monday night from home to build the sheet.

I write this down. I do not say anything about it yet.

Wednesday, ride-along

I ride to a job site with the field lead. Forty minutes each way in his truck. This is where a lot of the real answers live. He tells me, unprompted, that he stopped putting notes in the CRM eight months ago because the ops manager rewrites them anyway. He tells me the dispatch software they pay $1,400 a month for was chosen by an office manager who quit in early 2024. He tells me the technicians have a group text they use to warn each other about specific customers.

That group text is doing more actual coordination work than the $1,400 a month platform. I ask if I can be added. He shrugs and adds me. This will turn out to be the single most useful thing that happens all week.

Thursday, Slack archaeology

I sit in the owner's office with two coffees and I read the Slack for the last ninety days. All of it. Not to spy. To learn how the business actually talks to itself. Which channels are load-bearing. Which channels are performative. Which threads generated action. Which threads generated only more threads.

By 4 PM I can tell you who on this team is doing hidden coordination work that nobody notices. There is always at least one person doing this. In this business it is a scheduling coordinator named Marisol. She is not in leadership. She is holding the middle of this company together, and nobody has told her that out loud.

I write this one down. This one I will tell the owner about, but not this week.

Friday, the seat

I sit in the customer service seat for two hours. I do not take calls. I sit next to the rep who does, and I watch what her screen looks like when a customer calls in. She has seven tabs open. She toggles between three of them for every call. She has a personal spreadsheet on her desktop called quotes_backup because the CRM lost a batch of quotes back in February and nobody trusted it after that.

The CRM lost quotes in February. The rep built a backup spreadsheet. Leadership does not know about the spreadsheet. This is the kind of thing you cannot see from a discovery deck. You have to sit next to somebody for two hours on a Friday to know it exists.

What week one is not

Every operator I have walked into has had at least one consultant before me. Sometimes two, sometimes four. The pattern is the same. Someone came in, ran a discovery workshop, delivered a forty-slide report, and left. The owner paid a five-figure invoice, put the deck in Google Drive, and nothing changed. That deck is a monument to what consulting does when it is not willing to sit inside the business.

Week one of a Trenching engagement is the opposite of that deck. It is not a report. It is not a diagnosis on paper. It is time spent inside the four walls of your company. Riding along. Sitting in on the meetings you skip. Reading the Slack backlog. Watching the CRM go untouched. It is quiet, on purpose. I do not want to be building yet. I have not earned that yet.

Earning the right to build

Every consultant I have ever met wants to start building on day two. It is flattering to be asked to build. It also produces bad builds. If I show up on day two with a fix, I am fixing whatever your last consultant already told you was broken, or worse, whatever a category page told me was broken. Neither of those is the real thing.

The real thing lives in the group text. It lives in Marisol's Slack DMs. It lives in the personal spreadsheet on the CS rep's desktop. It lives in the hour the ops manager loses every Monday night to a Google Doc she should not have to maintain. None of it shows up on a discovery deck. All of it shows up in week one, if you sit still and watch.

That is what earning the right to build looks like. It is the week before the work, and it is why the work works.

I will write about week two soon. That is when we start touching things.